בתאריך יום ד׳, 14 ביוני 2023 ב-18:29 מאת Anass Sedrati <
sedranas@gmail.com>:
Hello Jon and thank you for the proposal,
I took a look at the Mossi Wikipedia, and indeed it seems that there is a
good activity there, ans also the quality of many existing articles is
really good. However, there are some points that I think need to be taken
into consideration before moving forward:
1- many articles (even the bigger ones) do not have a single reference,
and come of them are messy with just big chunks of text or very short
(example: Busa, Guure). If these editors will be the future administrators,
I think that they really need to be trained before. What do you think?
It's true, and it happens in many languages. There has never been a strict
rule about this in the Language committee. Here's my practice: I don't want
to enforce it or turn it into a blocker for approval. The most important
thing for me is the ability to write the prose of the articles with some
very basic formatting—links, headings, and not much more. This is the most
important ability that involves *language*, and we are the *language*
committee.
Having good references in an encyclopedia written by self-selected
volunteers is, generally, a good thing. This understanding developed in
Wikipedias in the big languages in the mid-2000s, because there was no
other way to keep them reliable and to keep the arguments about facts to a
minimum (eliminating them completely is, evidently, impossible).
However, I don't want to *enforce* the rules of the Wikipedia in English,
German, Russian, etc., on Wikipedias that are just beginning. I only want
to suggest them as a good idea, and to let each community develop the
details.
Perhaps a minimal global policy for referencing could be developed.
However, it probably shouldn't be done by the Language committee, but by
some other cross-language body.
And *some* short and low-quality articles are also not a blocker. If there
were *a lot* of those, then maybe I'd have doubts, but in this case, I
wouldn't call it "a lot".
2- the home page is fully written in English. This probably needs to be
fixed before approval?
Lol, it's one of those main pages that I create just so that the project
will have *some* main page :)
Editing main pages is excruciatingly difficult, in all languages. As I've
written above, the most important thing for me is the language of the
articles. The *look* of the main page is less important. The language is,
but this one is very short, and I asked them to translate it. So, not a
serious blocker.
3- the infoboxes bring information from Wikidata, but
this is problematic
because (a) they are very big with not always relevant information, and (b)
none of the items is translated and all of them are in English. This is
also something the editors need probably to look into?
Sigh. It's also correct, and also not a blocker. But this is a
demonstration of a few things I've been telling everyone for years:
1. People in pretty much all languages want infoboxes.
2. Copying intricate infoboxes from English, French, or Russian is terribly
difficult.
3. Copying the {{Databox}} is easier, so even if the result is less
satisfying than what the boxes in English or French provide,
4. There must be a global repository of templates so that it would be easy
to share them. Just in case someone hasn't already seen my proposal about
it, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Global_templates/Proposed_specification,_sho…
